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Trekkie's Poop
submitted anonymously
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September 1, 2009
The thing you have to understand to appreciate this story is, back when I was a freshman in high school, I was the kind of girl who wore black pants and heels, with my dyed-blonde hair done perfectly every single day... I did everything I could to look like Jennifer Aniston, essentially. I thought of myself as a "good Christian girl," albeit one who slavishly followed the trends.
So that's why it was complete DOOMSDAY when I found out that I'd have to do a week of swimming for gym class. It would probably have been fine, if they had given us time to get ready before our next class, but I remember them telling us, "This is gonna only be a week, so just know that you might be a little wet in your next class. So bring something comfortable to wear... " The word comfortable had no place in my fashion vocabulary.
My best friend Laura shared this imperative to create that "cool girl" identity based on the aforementioned slavish attention to the details of our "look," and so we were both scheming from the start how to get out of this class. We showed up to swimming class on Day One with monumental dread. But it got worse before we even went near the pool. In the locker room, the first thing we see is Trekkie, this girl from Special Ed. She was called Trekkie because she wore a Star Trek T-shirt every day and when she saw someone she would hold her fingers up like Spock and say "Neenu Neenu"... and she dressed nerdy with long, braided, high pigtails down to her waist. She was naked, drying herself off with a towel. We found out that her class had swimming before us, and, being the kind of girls we were at the time, it was understood that we should be totally grossed out by this fact.
8
Susanne Friedman
Encaustic, Mixed Media
13"X15"
Anyway, we somehow managed to recover our composure after seeing Trekkie's unabashed nakedness, and for the first class we went along and swam, and were of course mortified for the whole rest of the day to be seen so disheveled.
At lunch that day, before Laura ate her brownie, a light bulb went off. She looked at me, one eyebrow raised, and said, "Doesn't this brownie look a little like poop?" and I said, "Especially with the nuts in it." She began sculpting the brownie into a long log. We looked at each other and we both knew what was going to happen the next day, before swim class.
What had seemed at first to be an unfortunate happenstance, having Trekkie's class swimming before ours, turned out to be our salvation.
So the next day, Laura and I got to gym class a little early and stealthily made our drop into the shallow end of the pool. As rehearsed, we reported our "find" to the gym teacher: "Um, we're not sure, but we think Trekkie might have had a little accident."
Needless to say, swimming was canceled that day for health reasons. And not only that day. When we showed up for class on Friday, they had drained the pool, which I realize only now in telling this story, must have cost the school thousands of dollars. Having that on our heads, plus years of remorse about how we took advantage of poor Trekkie, all to get us out of several bad hair days!